Party games make Canton man a star

By David Crumm, Detroit Free Press Staff Writer
April 24, 2006

Canton's Garry Donner has been playing around most of his life -- but he's done it so cleverly that he has climbed into the ranks of the world's top game designers.

Two of the games produced by a small company he cofounded 30 years ago are among six new party games praised this month in a Time magazine review of the best new games, headlined "Beyond Monopoly."

"We're having some pretty good luck right now," Donner said, working with his daughter, Wendy Harris, and her son, Michael Donner, 13, earlier this month as they tested games in a warehouse in Ann Arbor.

Donner and his grandson tried out one of the games, Wallamoppi, a wooden stacking game praised in the review. The other game is a word game called Last Word.

"We're getting very good vibes everywhere about this game, Wallamoppi," a nonsense name that's pronounced just as it's spelled, Donner said. "It's fun. It's quick. A whole game takes less than five minutes and people like the price. It sells for around $20."

The game is so new that people might need to search for it, he said, although that may change by Christmas, when it should be on many retailers' shelves. Online retailer Amazon sells it for $24.99.

"Here's how it works. It goes very fast," Donner said, taking turns with his grandson in trying to stack checker-size wooden disks into a steep tower on a table in the middle of their warehouse. But that's only half the game. As one player stacks a checker, the other player turns to a wooden maze and tries to keep a black marble from rolling too far through the maze's interlocking chutes.

"The marble falls quickly, and that acts kind of like a timer, so both players are working as fast as they can," Donner said, a moment before his and his grandson's hands collided in the middle of the table and wooden disks flew everywhere.

They both laughed.

"That's the best kind of game," Donner said. "It takes just a few minutes to learn, but it moves fast, everyone has fun playing -- and you can keep playing it over and over."

The game-design company is called Random Games and Toys and is run by Donner, 57, his daughter, 29, and three other full-time game designers. Beyond the five-person staff, the operation is as low budget as possible. The warehouse is equipped with simple steel shelves and worktables that look more like military surplus than high-tech equipment.

But, Donner said, "This is not a hobby. It's a very tough, very competitive business. These days, when we develop new games, we're competing with the best in the world."

Donner and his partners at Random have had dozens of successes, but those were drawn from "probably more than 1,500 games we've done overall, including games we've developed or we've helped other people develop. You can see, there are very few hits in this business."

That's how it is in the game genre, generally referred to as party games.

It took four years for Canadians Chris Haney and Scott Abbott to turn their initial concept into Trivial Pursuit, which became an enormous hit before Christmas 1983.

Donner also got a huge boost from Trivial Pursuit.

Until the mid-1980s, Donner worked first as a math teacher in Coldwater and later as a computer expert, trying to develop games for his fledgling company in his spare time. "Then, in 1984, we developed these decks of cards called Pocket Trivia -- 800 trivia questions in a deck that sold for $1.50 -- and we sold over 10 million of those. That let us go full time with our company."

In the two decades since then, Donner has spent a lot of time thinking about what prompts Americans to pull a game off the shelf and play it.

"I think people get tired of activities like going to a movie with friends," Donner said. "After all, you meet for a movie and then it's like playing multiple solitaire to sit there in the theater, not talking to each other.

"With a game, people talk to each other. We see their personalities. They laugh and, in some of the newer games that ask questions about our lives, we wind up sharing our stories with each other. As we play, we wind up exchanging a little bit of our personalities with each other."